Freefall QAL Winners

Again, I can't thank everyone enough for participating and finishing your quilts, be they tops or done and dusted! Thank you to those who started the QAL, but life got in the way; when you finish your top or quilt please do send me a photo as I'd love to see it.

First prize was the fat quarter stack of Freefall fabrics, the very same ones I used for my Freefall quilt, from Paintbrush Studio. It goes to

Helen of Midget Gem Quilts!

Next we had a few gift certificates.

$25 to Sew Sisters Quilt Shop 

This goes to Kathleen, on Flickr:

$25 gift certificate to Fat Quarter Shop

Vicki of Vicki's Crafts and Quilting

6 fat quarters of 3 half-yard cuts from Needle and Foot Fine Fabrics

Yvonne of Quilting Jet Girl

A copy of Crafted Appliqué by Lara Bucella of Buzzin Bumble

Julie of Pink Doxies

2 winners get 2 patterns from Meadow Mist Designs

Jean of All Points of the Compass

I was so touched that she'd done a quilt in a tree shot, and such a special tree, her husband's dad's memorial tree, a Weeping Pear.

Had to include the second photo so you can see the beautiful batiks she used

and

Rose at something rosemade

2 patterns from Quilting Jet Girl

Kathleen at Kathleen McMusing

A pattern from Sew Fresh Quilts and one from Tish's Adventures in Wonderland

Lisa of Sunlight in Winter Quilts

A pattern from Canuck Quilter Designs and one from Stitchin At Home

Tish of Tish's Adventures in Wonderland 

A pattern from Cooking Up Quilts and one from me, mmm! quilts

Natalie

Laura on Instagram also finished her quilt top, but confessed she didn't know how to link up, so here is her quilt.  I have sent her a copy of both mine and Tish's patterns.

I will be in touch with the winners.

Windblown Cushion Cover

This little gem of a cushion or pillow cover was on my Q1 FAL list.  Oh well, the point is it's done, right? And I just love it! So summery.

I had plans to drive to my beloved Lakeside Park to do the photo shoot, but then I thought hmm, maybe there's a spot in our yard, rounded the back of the deck and spied this!  Like you'd think I had totally planned it, down to putting the begonia there.  Nope.  But I'll take it!

You saw the flimsy in my previous post.  This cushion is based on my Freefall and Windfall quilt pattern, but uses only four blocks of the half and half kind. There were a few choices I had to arrange the four...

It was hard to decide!  In the end I thought floating them on a large pinwheel would add to the twirling effect. I got the top together, complete with mitred corners, and called it a night.  Went upstairs the next morning to layer it and figure out a quilting plan...

Someone had laid claim to it! The cheek! If you look closely at the upper left corner by the migrating geese strips, you will see her very own perch, one of several, I might add, by a window, complete with her very own handmade by yours truly, cushion. She likes the new stuff.  Without fail.

Some of the quilting plan came to me no problem:

Loving the sheen of the Sulky white rayon.

The lines in the white areas in opposite directions I thought would look kind of cool.  Then I did flowing lines on the diagonal in the leaves themselves.  Finally the turquoise sections...hmmm. I was stumped for a bit, so I pulled out my trusty plexiglass and dry erase markers, brilliant idea of my friend Tish, and drew out a couple of thoughts:

What? No feathers? Maybe dot to dot then...meh...the continuous curve appealed to me.

Found some matching rayon thread by Gütermann, and off I went, just eye-balling the curves.  I went with three straight lines centred in the borders, and called it a night.

Managed to capture a quick shot of the back as the sun was setting.

Just as I was dropping off to sleep, zing! Into my head popped the idea, (but of course, Sandra!) of doing a flanged binding. Yes! So I did.

Perfect choice!

Here is the back, an envelope style, but I don't double the fabric layers.  I wouldn't have had enough fabric anyhow, ha!

I remembered to sew on my mmm! quilts label from Ikaprint AS I was sewing on the binding:

When I stitched down the flange, I used the turquoise rayon on the top.  I am not a fan of the line of stitching you get on the back when doing binding this way, although I sure am a fan of the look and the speed. I thought the white cotton Gütermann would show more on the back...what are the chances I'd have a salmon/rose colour to put in the bobbin... Chances were great! I stocked up on quite a variety of colours of Essential thread at one of Connecting Threads' sales. That is an affiliate link, so it is also my duty to let you know that clicking it will take you to the thread sale currently on (25% off so that means US$2.09 for a 1200 yard spool of 100% cotton, terrific thread) and I might mention that all their batting is 30% off as well. That's when I usually pick up a few packages of Hobbs, the brand they carry. Anyhow, threads:

You actually do get a bit of an idea of the sheen the rayon threads give in that photo.

In retrospect, I think a circle quilting motif would have been better for the spinning effect.  That thought struck me this morning when I went to do the binding, and I saw the finished cover sitting on my sewing table.  Maybe there's another one of these in my future!

Quilt Stats:
Pattern:  Windblown, original design
Size:  after quilting 18.25"
Fabric: Recollection by Katarina Rocella (how I love her work) for Art Gallery Fabrics, Stof Fabrics in turquoise, Kona Snow
Batting: Warm n Natural
Quilted: on my Bernina
Threads:  pieced with Gütermann; quilted with Sulky rayon, Gütermann rayon

Once I release the pattern, which will hopefully be in July, I will include instructions for making this pillow as well as both sizes of quilts.  If you haven't seen all the beautiful renditions of Freefall, go back one post or click here, and follow the links to gorgeous takes on my design!  If you fell behind in the QAL, you have until Sunday afternoon, 4 pm EST to link up your flimsy or your finished quilt to be eligible for some pretty sweet prizes. And if this is the first time seeing my Freefall pattern, all the steps to make the quilt are in the Freefall tab up top, and all the steps are available as free PDFs in my Craftsy store. 😊

Speaking of Sunday, and Craftsy, all things sweet, Craftsy is having a Supplies Sale from now until Sunday.  This is when I have scored some pretty sweet deals on kits and on fabric and yarns.  As always, thank you so much if you click through on my links to either Craftsy or Connecting Threads.

Linking up
Crazy Mom Quilts
TGIFF at Cut & Alter
Busy Hands Quilts

The Birthday of a Famous Canadian

Today is the birthday of my father, Cliff, who would have been 91, were he still alive. I miss him so much still, things I know he'd love, things I know he'd find hilarious, things I wish I could share with him. The Freefall Quilt Along was an idea germinated last Fall when I participated in a blog hop for Paintbrush Studio, organized by Bernie of Needle and Foot.  I made Windfall using the gorgeous collection of that same name.  This quilt is, to paraphrase Yvonne of Quilting Jet Girl, a quintessential Canadian quilt, perfect and timely for Canada's sesquicentennial, 150th birthday on July 1, 2017, although I didn't plan it to be all this at the time.

Taken in my home town of Kingsville, Ontario, Fall 2016, 50.5" square

Blue Skies Story

Remember Blue Skies? My first 'for sale' pattern?  Well she has another 'first' under her belt...

She's been sold! My first sale in my Etsy shop. I could say, "Wow! 50% of my stock has just been sold in my Etsy shop!" Which is entirely true.  See how one can manipulate stats? Yeah, I have only had two items in it for the past year, grin, and ahem...I need to amend that, I know.  Or should I say, I need to augment that?!  It'll happen.  Just like my sewing room, just like our kitchen (eep! It's so exciting, picked out the granite today! The only part that someone other than my MacGyver has to do.)

Green Geese

I am behind in just about everything in my life these days, including an unplanned hiatus from Ashtanga yoga, but I keep plodding along. Here is the green row, May's colour, for my Migrating Geese, project #2, in the RSC 2017 at soscrappy.

Man! That would've been such a good lead-off photo for a May RSC post!

Singer Featherweight Love #1

This is the first in an installment of five, maybe more, posts on vintage Singer sewing machines.  You may recall from this post that in finally actively pursuing my long-held desire to own a Featherweight after seeing Paula Nadelstern's in her tiny NYC apartment, that I inadvertently am now the owner of 4 more vintage Singer machines. I already was the proud, albeit a bit ashamed owner (I still haven't taken the time to get her up and running) of my grandma's treadle machine.

Here you see the three of the four gals that now belong to me, in various stages of their spa treatments.

I Like/Love #5

1. I like rhododendrons, especially when they are mine!

This beauty came with the house, and she's pretty big:

Flanged Binding Tweaked - A Tutorial

By now you know that I quite like a flanged binding. Tish got me onto Susie's Magic Binding at Aunt Marti's 52 Quilts.  It makes a really great binding.  My problem was that at 2.5" it was too wide, especially for wallhangings, and I ended up cutting off points when I applied the binding, despite there being ample seam allowance.  Solution? Trim the quilt sandwich to larger than 1/4" seam allowance or adjust the binding widths.

I elected to adjust the binding widths, to end up with a 2.25" wide binding, my preferred width.  Here is what I've come up with.  Thank you to Jean of All Points of the Compass for the suggestion to have it out before the Freefall QAL final parade of quilts on June 15.  Which is just around the corner--like how?? There's a little update about that at the bottom of this tutorial.

All right. Let's do the binding.  I used pictures of Harbinger of Spring, my version of Tish and David's first oh-so-pretty pattern available on Craftsy, still at a reduced price, to do this tutorial. You can see the pop of yellow just inside the perimeter of the quilt.

1. You need two colours, your main, (mine is the striped) and the flange, (mine is the yellow).  The flange will be your pop of colour.  Something that struck me as a bit odd is that your flange is cut wider than your main colour, but so it is.  Cut the main 1.25" and the flange 1.5".  Cut enough strips to go around the perimeter of your quilt plus about 10" extra for joining the ends. Join them as you would any binding, on a 45° angle, pressing the seams open or closed.

A note on pressing: I've done both; because of the 45° angle, the seams are evenly distributed across the binding edge, so it really doesn't matter, and I do tend to think pressing to one side is stronger.  Some of my quilts are a little over 20 years old now, and the binding edge has started to fray; I've even had to repair some hand stitches on a couple of quilts, so they do wear... and that's a good thing! That means they're loved and used.  Here there is a little extra bulk because of the joined strips of two colours, so I will usually press the seams open.

2. Now sew the two lengths together on the long long edge.  Before starting to sew, read step 3!

3. Worth noting: try to avoid what you see below. Before starting to sew the binding strips together along the long edge, run them through your hands together to see if they will be a little more offset than you see mine here.  Again, it will help to reduce bulk.  Mine ended working fine; I was not ripping this out after sewing 180+ inches together!

4. Press the seams towards the main fabric.  Having a quilt inspector for this step, along with that Steamfast little iron which I just love, keeps everything in line. (Affiiliate link there, but I would never steer you wrong on a great purchase.)

5. Then, align and press the raw edges together.  This is what happens because of the different widths of each binding strip:

A very narrow stripe of the flange colour will appear at the bottom. That is perfect.  Look at the flange (all-yellow) side; all you see is yellow!

6. Sew the binding to the back of your quilt using your walking foot, with a 1/4" seam allowance, and having the main fabric against the backing of your quilt; the flange side is up.

I tend to align the binding a hair's width inside the edge of the quilt sandwich. This just allows that 'leetle' bit extra when folding it around to the front.  Below you see what it looks like after you've finished piecing it to the quilt back.

Join the ends as you would your regular binding.  Here is the final join.  I'm getting pretty decent at nailing the alignment of the binding and the flange!

My own tutorial is here for getting a lovely 45° angle join of the two binding ends.  One thing I've found with this technique is that it is pretty tricky getting the joined strips of binding to line up nicely but if you stab through the layers with a pin straight up and down, leaving the pin like a nail at that join, and then pin regularly through the layers on either side of the 'nail', you can get a pretty good alignment. This will make sense when you actually do the join.

7. Press the binding away from the quilt back, nice and flat, as you see below.

8.  Then bring it around to the front of the quilt and press it flat again.  You could glue it down; I've done both: glued and not glued.  I prefer the glue method (Elmer's School Glue - it's non-toxic and washable) as it makes the stitching mindless.  Stitch in the ditch between the flange (yellow) and the main (stripes) binding.  I match the thread to the flange, so here I used yellow, with a white or cream in the bobbin.

It looks relatively neat but for the stitching line, on the back.  However, once the quilt is washed, that pretty much melts into the quilt back.

Ta da!  Pretty slick, no?

Freefall Update!
You have one more week to finish up your quilts.  Originally I thought the parade would be for finished quilts only, but you know what? Life happens to us all, and it certainly has been a-happenin' to me as you well know, over the past couple of months.

So.

I have lots of prizes and I'd love for each one of you who has faithfully been quilting along, to be eligible for a prize.  I know that life stuff, some good, some not so good, has happened to some of you over the past little bit, so a flimsy in my books is good enough for entry into the parade and draws.

Deal?

Good.  I thought so.

Linking up:
Sew Fresh Quilts
Quilt Fabrication

June OMG & Winner

For the month of June One Monthly Goal, at Elm Street Quilts, I plan to have the cows quilt quilted, bound and on its way to my aunt.  It will only be a year and a half late...

I have had the backing for some time, snagged in the Sew Sisters Quilt Shop  clearance section, which, btw is pretty fantastic. It's Windham Fabrics "Farm Chic" by Kate McRostie.

Then, this past winter I discovered the farm animals in various yoga poses,  "Willow Creek" for elizabeth's studio, so of course, I had to snag a little of that to incorporate into the back as well as some other fun future project!

Besides the OMG goal, I have a personal goal to be caught up on my 150 Canadian Women QAL as well as my three RSC projects which have been sadly neglected since leaving Florida.  I did work a bit on green, which was May's colour, for project #3:

Trying to bring a bit of order to a scrap vortex-looking quilt by doing the opposing corners in fabrics that read solid; multi-coloured ones are going down the centre, framed in black strips.

There's a rogue block, bottom left corner, that was my test block, before I had the idea to calm the crazy a bit.  It takes a bit more thought than I'd realized: do you see how I have the start of 3 more purple squares, another turquoise one, and another green one, even though I have four green corners? That's why I've started leaving one side of the black strip empty so I can hopefully work around this!

And project #2:

I didn't do any April multi-colour blocks/rows for any of the three projects since I just want the rainbow effect; however, my multi-colour scrap challenge was fulfilled when I did the Welcome to Canada quilt.

Sadly, I didn't even make a dent in the multi-colour strips or scraps boxes. 😖

This is just one example of why things are moving at a snail's pace in the sewing department of late:

Pieces from a Freefall cushion cover I am making, for which I made a test block before we left Florida, and also for which I was sure I had cut all the pieces.  Yet when it came time to sewing the last 3 blocks, I was short several pieces. 'How odd,' I thought.  Looked around on the cutting table and the former shoe rack-turned-fabric-shelf that had sat there before I got to have yet another piece of the former kitchen cabinets up here...  Nada.  Weird.  Weird.  Well, maybe I'd thought to wait in case I changed my mind about fabric placement...but the missing pieces had no logical order to what had not been cut.  So I cut those I needed.

A few days later, I pulled the shoe rack out to move this shelf in its place, and what did I spy?  Fabric pieces.  WTH...  Emit another massive sigh...  That shelf didn't end up there; it's in another place.  Yes, I will be giving you a tour of progress up here one of these days.

All right time to announce the winner of Star Blossom, Tish and David's beautiful pattern!  Remember if this is not you, then you have another week I believe to snag your copy at a discounted price!  Thank you to all of you for your wonderful comments and such kind words on my version of their pattern.

There were 76 comments, and the winner is:

Congratulations to Donna W!  This is a first: the first number pulled had an email!  When you make Star Blossom, Donna, be sure to shoot me a photo as well as Tish.